Python Progress Bar

What is a Python Progress Bar?

A Python progress bar is a visual that lets us know how long will a task take to complete or what is the progress status of the task.

For codes that work on large data sets, like some projects in Machine Learning, you need something to let you know if your code is stuck on an infinite loop or how much progress has the code done. For such purposes, we have some libraries in Python that allow us to add progress bars.

Different Ways to Add a Progress Bar in Python

There are two widely used ways (by “ways” I mean library) to add a progress bar in Python:

• tqdm library
• progressbar or progressbar2 library

Making a Python Progress Bar Using the tqdm Library

Installation

For installing the tqdm library you just need to do it like any other library.

Working

Let us take some task, and execute them in a loop.

The above statement sleep(1) takes one second to execute. So, when we loop it 5 times, it will take 5 seconds to execute. But there is no progress bar to track that. Let us make a simple progress bar using tqdm.

You need to write the following code to make the Python progress bar.

Output:

Example

We will add some new attributes in each example and see what it results in.

In a Python progress bar, we have multiple new attributes, let’s check them out:

• desc: description of the task.
• ascii: we can form the progress bar using different ascii characters of our choice. Example: for the $ sign, we need to put “123456789$” as ascii value. False will result in the standard progress bar as we can see.
• ncols: this decides the width of the progress bar.
• total: the total number of tasks to be done
• mininterval: the minimum time after which the progress bar should update. It is by default 0.1.
• units: we can specify the time unit we want to use. By default, it is “it”. Here, we set the unit to "ticks"
• initial: we can specify the initial starting point of the progress bar, in our case we say 50% of 200 tasks are done initially, so it starts thereafter.

Try messing up with these values to learn more!

Output:

Making a Python Progress Bar using Progressbar Library

Installation

This is similar to any other library,

Working

This is very similar to the tqdm progress bar, but has some extra features that allow us to create animated progress bars. The syntax is also quite simple and easy to understand when compared to tqdm library.

This is a simple progress bar that does 100 iterations and each iteration is of 0.01 seconds.

Output:

We also have a widget object that defines the bar with attributes like:

• The ascii character which should be used to form the bar.
• The estimated time for completion.
• We can set the timer format to show how much time has elapsed, and many more other things.

Example

Let us take an example and see how this library works. We will make an animated progress bar with $ sign, showing the estimated time to complete the task, and the time elapsed.

Code:

Output:

More Examples for Understanding Python Progress Bars

Example 1

Let us iterate over a list of strings and display them along with a progress bar to track the progress.

Code:

Output:

In the above example, there are 5 strings and we take 1 second to print a string. So in total, we needed 5 seconds to print the entire list. And for each string, there is 20% progress.

Example 2

We can make our progress bars colorful!

Code:

Output:

See Also:

• Sleep in Python.